DAVAO LIGHT AND POWER COMPANY
Regarding the Assignment 2 which tackle about the risks associated with business and IS/IT change, we considered the Davao Light and Power Company as our adopted organization. Davao Light and Power Company is the third largest privately owned electric utility in the Philippines. One of the country's top 300 corporations, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Aboitiz Group of Companies' investment arm, Aboitiz Equity Ventures, Inc. It holds the franchise for distributing electric power to Davao City, the largest city in the world in terms of land area, as well as Panabo City and the municipalities of Carmen, Dujali, and Sto. Tomas in Davao del Norte. On September 29, 2000, the franchise was renewed for another 25 years by virtue of Republic Act 8960.
It was just this Wednesday, July 8, 2009, when Davao Light and Power Company texted us and confirmed that we could conduct a three hour interview with them.
It was scheduled on July 9, 2009, Thursday, yesterday actually. There were five of us in our group and four from the other group who were given the chance by them. They gave us a very warm welcome and headed toward their Conference room to be our venue for the presentation they have prepared and fro the proper interview. Our interviewee is part of the Information System Department (ISD), one of the department that composes their Information Services Group (ISG).
Anyways, he first showed us a presentation illustrating their Management Information System. He also presented the development of some of the hardware and the systems being used for the data processing of the company. It was from 1978 when they started to evolve from a lower level of systems until they have came up there new system for the present usage. He illustrated that the Electronics Data Processing building have been using the Nova 2 Data General Corporation Computer for handing out the data, with the features of process data 3oo lines per minute, 64 kb and 3 CRT.
From then on, they transfer to NCR Century 201. They used it form 1978 – 1983. Unlike to NOVA 2, it process much data for 3000 lines per minute, 128 kb, 2x655 5 mb Disk drive and 2x657 96 mb Disk drive. Then on 1983 – 1994, the Electronics Data Processing building, was been changed to a department and manage the data using the IBM Mainframe 4331 and 4361. Their primary programming language that time is the COBOL or the COmmon Business-Oriented Language. Until such time the growth of the company have reached its highest peak, clipper has been introduced to them.
Clipper is a computer programming language that is used to create software programs that originally operated primarily under DOS. Although it is a powerful general-purpose programming language, it was primarily used to create database/business programs. For the past few years, the Davao Light and Power Company have been in the business. Not only the systems but also the structure of their Organization have gone through changes also.
Changes have been made in order to enhance the performance of their database, which is the one responsible for storing all the data being process in the company. With the existence of technology, a lot of things have been discovered and instituted to them. These particular things have been amended of course for the benefit of their company. Well, if we talk about alteration and changes, we can never let go of risks associated with it. Especially in the business, risks have been considered also.
As we asked our interviewee, about the risks associated with business and IS/IT change in their company, he then started to list some risk they have encountered so far.
1. Comparison of the new system to the old one - He gave us an example of the situation which happened in 2005. That time the programming language they have been using is the clipper. But they just observed that every month their system always crash. He described the clipper as a not robust for their database. Because of this, they begun using the Oracle as their foremost database management system up to this present. Although Oracle, have given them much easier tasks as its processed data more faster than the clipper, still there’s lacking to. The users of the databases have been commenting sometimes about the new one, that the old one is more great. Lot of comparisons have arises. In this situation, adopting new system is not that easy even if it do more great works than the previous one.
2. Financial - Adjusting to the latest changes made have been an issue and also a risk. We can never deny that financial aspect is always a factor when newborn technology pioneered in an organization. They will always considered the cost of the product that will be using.
3. Piracy – this kind of situation is not already new to them. It is about their employee being pirated by other companies. The setting is, the employees have just limited knowledge of some programming language. But as technology grows, their expertise should widen also. That’s why they decide to learn these things also. Once the other company knew about this, that this particular man is good with this, they immediately offer a new job with an immense salary. As usual, no man can be reluctant with this kind of offer. Then with this changes, the risk of being pirated could never been denied.
4. Security – this are the risk associated with the vulnerability of the system, information and networks. Risk of intrusions and connectivity to other vulnerable systems risk associated with the evolution of credible threats.
5. Organizational and change management – this is the risk associated with organizational, agency or government- wide cultural resistance to change and standardization; risk associated with bypassing or lack of use improper use or adherence to new systems and processes because of organizational structure and culture; inadequate training planning.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org
www.davaolight.com
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